Hasta La Gadget!

The New York Times‘ coverage of Congressional antics related to the Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) legislation has ignored so many critical aspects of the bill that it might be time for the “paper of record” to change its motto from “All the news that’s fit to print” to “All the news we think fits, we print”.

Here’s why.

On March 2nd, the Senate Finance Committee voted unanimously to insert an amendment into the TPA legislation. According to its principal sponsor, Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD), the amendment would “include among the principal negotiating objectives of the United States regarding commercial partnerships…discouraging activity that… penalizes, or otherwise limits commercial relations with Israel”. The intended targets of this effort are the countries of the European Union that have called on Israel to clearly mark whether products they export originate in settlements in occupied Palestinian lands.

For the first 14 years of the occupation, the US called Israeli settlement construction “illegal”. Beginning with the Reagan Administration, however, the US dumbed down its language referring to settlements as “unhelpful”, “illegitimate”, or “an obstacle to peace”. Europe, on the other hand, has been consistent in affirming the international consensus position that such settlements are in violation of international law.

Having wearied of Israel’s refusal to abide by conventions that ban the expropriation of or transfer of population into occupied lands, Europe’s actions are intended to send a clear message of displeasure with Israel’s continued flagrant violation of these laws as well as making a statement that Europe will not be party to Israel’s efforts to derive economic benefits from the settlements.

Fearing that European pressure will only grow as Israel’s government rejects efforts to end its occupation activities, AIPAC (Washington’s pro-Israel lobby) made it a legislative priority to suborn the US government making it a defender Israel’s settlement policies. Enter Ben Cardin and his colleagues.

At the behest of AIPAC, Cardin introduced his amendment which defines the actions that US trade officials must include in negotiating trade arrangements with EU partners in order to discourage agreements with countries that have instituted measures “that are politically motivated and are intended to penalize or otherwise limit commercial relations specifically with Israel or person’s doing business in Israel or in Israeli-controlled territories.” Similar, though more far-reaching, language has also been inserted in House and Senate legislation governing US custom’s authorization.

It is especially troubling that the words “in Israeli-controlled territories” have been inserted in these amendments. This language, which equates Israel with the territories Israel occupied in 1967, replicates the language recently used by Israel’s Supreme Court in a controversial ruling against any advocacy of boycott, divestment, or sanctions activity in Israel. The TPA, as amended, will, for the first time, make the US complicit in shielding Israel’s settlement activity from any international scrutiny or penalty.

As disturbing as is this effort to defend Israel’s behavior and to pit the US against its European trading partners is the disingenuous way Members of Congress have sought to explain their actions.

Senator Cardin:

Israel is one of America’s closest allies and the only stable democracy in the Middle East. We may not agree with every Israeli policy, but we cannot allow our potential trading partners in the EU to fall prey to efforts that threaten Israel’s existence.

Senator Rob Portman (R-OH):

This amendment sends a clear message that if you want to be an economic partner with the United States, you cannot support politically motivated boycotts [that] attempt to weaken Israel.

Congressman Peter Roskam (R-OH):

This measure will make combating these boycotts a principal trade objective of the United States in our negotiations with the EU…countries seeking free trade with the United States cannot participate in…economic warfare against Israel.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR):

We shouldn’t let American trade policy be used in any kind of fashion that would in some ways show a tolerance for that kind of anti-Semitism.

Contrary to these outrageous claims, EU measures are not “economic warfare”, nor are they intended to “weaken” or “threaten the existence of Israel”, and they are most certainly not displays of “anti-Semitism”. Rather they are Europe’s modest attempt to insure that they do not unwittingly economically underwrite illegal settlement activity that they cannot support. In this context, it is worth noting that the Administrations of both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton also applied economic pressures to dissociate the US from Israeli settlement construction by annually deducting the amount Israel spent on such activity from the US loan guarantees that would be available to Israel to resettle Russian Jews. Were these two presidents also guilty of “economic warfare” and “anti-Semitism”?

The bottom line is that if Congress passes the TPA legislation and it is signed into law with the Cardin amendment intact: the US will be defending Israeli settlements against European pressure; we will be making our trade relations with our European allies conditional on their conducting trade with Israeli settlements, in contravention of their own long-standing policy; and we will, for the first time, establish, as US policy, the conflation of Israel with the territory it has occupied, expropriated, and settled since 1967.

As momentous as these changes in US policy will be, readers of the New York Times have been kept in the dark. Since the Cardin amendment was first inserted in the TPA bill, over 60 articles have appeared in the Times covering the legislation. This includes over 20 articles and an editorial that have appeared in the “paper of record” since the debate heated up in the past two weeks. During this entire period, never once has the Times seen fit to even mention these amendments or describe their consequences for US-European relations or our overall Middle East policy. Instead of suggesting a nefarious cover-up, it may just be that for the editors of the Times these matters, as important as they are, just didn’t fit the story line they were developing. Thus, my suggestion that the more appropriate motto for the Times would be “All the news we think fits, we print”.

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Mollie Spilman is Chief Revenue Office at Criteo, which she joined in 2014, and leads all commercial operations globally. She has spent 24 years in the media business, with 16 of those years in the digital ad space. Prior to Criteo she was EVP, Global Sales and Operations at Millennial Media and CMO at Yahoo! Her experience also includes the roles of CEO at two ad tech start-ups as well as senior executive positions at other large media companies including Time Warner, Meredith Corporation and Discovery Networks. Mollie has been honored with multiple industry awards, including Mobile Marketing’s “Mobile Women to Watch” in 2012 and Ad Age’s “Women to Watch” in 2013. She has also served as a Director of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, Mobile Marketing Association and the Ad Council.

How has your life experience made you the leader you are today?
Growing up, I was exposed to many different people, cultures and activities. I developed a diversity of interests – music, art, sports and literature – and aspired to achieve something in each. This translated well into the workplace, where, as a leader, I juggle numerous projects. I tackle them head on and strive to add value daily. It is that experience that has given me the confidence to take risks and embrace new challenges.

One of my hardest life experiences – the loss of a child – also taught me important leadership lessons. I learned to look at life’s big picture and focus my energy on what is important. I was naturally empathic from a young age, but this made me even more so. I’m able to manage adversity and truly listen to and consider multiple vantage points, which helps me gain the trust of and inspire others. It also made me understand how critical work/life balance is in establishing a productive and healthy environment, and I try to instill that belief in the people I work with.

How has your previous employment experience aided your position at Criteo?
In my career, I’ve started companies from scratch and been challenged to get both employees and customers on board in early stages, relying on vision and a unique offering rather than a mature product. I’ve also worked at large companies like AOL, Yahoo! and Time Inc. and have learned to navigate corporate cultures and manage international teams. Through these combined experiences, I’m able to help Criteo be nimble and visionary, while maintaining the strong operational structure of an established company.

At Criteo, my main focus is growing our mobile business. Because I’ve been in the media space for nearly 25 years, with 16 of those spent in the digital ad space, I’ve seen the industry evolve and have become intimate with the challenges faced by global CMOs. Because I understand the mindset of our customers and partners – marketers, ad agencies and publishers – I’m able to help brands understand and act on the opportunity mobile and cross-device advertising presents.

What have the highlights and challenges been during your tenure at Criteo?
This is truly one of the best teams I have ever worked with – we’ve achieved tremendous growth and continued geographic expansion. We introduced a new, cross-device performance marketing product that we truly believe is industry-leading. Helping clients use a product that transparently and powerfully drives revenue for their companies has certainly been a highlight. While this constantly improving and expanding product portfolio is exciting, managing its complexity has also been a challenge.

What advice can you offer women who are seeking a career in the media?
First – never stop asking questions. Every industry evolves and media is certainly not exempt. You need to be hungry to learn and acquire new skills. Use the knowledge that exists within your company, but also look beyond that. Find a mentor. Someone who can help you navigate your industry and career trajectory is invaluable.

How do you maintain a work/life balance?
Everyone has a different perspective on what work/life balance means. I aim for this balance to be weekly, monthly and yearly. This is what is realistic for me as a part of a global company. Travel, client meetings, big launches and being able to support my team and fellow executives isn’t always a nine-to-five job. I acknowledge that, for me, it is not possible to have a perfect work/life balance every single day, but that it can be achieved in the long run.

What do you think is the biggest issue for women in the workplace?
I mentioned the importance of a mentor. Female leadership has long been an issue in the workplace. In more recent years, it has been brought to the forefront and we’ve gained high-profile female leaders. These women are role models, which is wonderful, but far too few women in the workplace have a female mentor. Women need to work together and share personal advice and experiences. I believe that having a female mentor is an important and often overlooked part of reaching your full potential.

How has mentorship made a difference in your professional and personal life?
Mentorship has helped me challenge myself and get out of my comfort zone. Having a resource to talk through challenges with, gain an outside perspective from, and support me has given me the self-confidence to embrace change.

Which other female leaders do you admire and why?
The first that comes to mind is Sheryl Sandberg. She’s done an incredible job of empowering women and bringing issues for women in the workplace to the forefront through her writing and events. The second is Condoleezza Rice. She has such poise, intelligence and diverse abilities, which is important in any leader.

What do you want Criteo to accomplish in the next year?
I have three specific goals for Criteo. Two are product-related: cross-device advertising leadership in the market and sell-through of our newest email and mobile products. The third is increased global expansion. Cross-device and cross-channel is where the industry is focused and we want to be the company brands rely on for that – no matter where they are and what they do.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

ICYMI Health features what we’re reading this week.

This week, we were taken by personal stories, including HuffPost Highline’s first longform feature piece about a record-breaking young runner with Tourette syndrome. We were also captivated by a daughter chronicling her mother’s mental illness through photographs, and touching public radio interview with British neurologist Oliver Sacks, who was diagnosed with terminal cancer earlier this year.

Read on and tell us in the comments: What did you read, listen to and love this week?

1. The Friend — Esquire

When the author’s 36-year-old wife is given a terminal cancer diagnosis, his friend Dane drops everything to move in with the family and help them make it through two harrowing years.

Quote: “I was in shock and stayed there a long time. We don’t tell each other the truth about dying, as a people. Not real dying. Real dying, regular and mundane dying, is so hard and so ugly that it becomes the worst thing of all: It’s grotesque.”

2. Amaris Tyynismaa: The Human Body Is A Miracle, The Human Body Is A Curse — The Huffington Post Highline

The first story from The Huffington Post’s new longform section, Highline, features a profile on a 13-year-old who can run a mile in under five minutes, even as she struggles with Tourette syndrome in her day-to-day life.

Quote: “Amaris’s physique has become a matter of widespread conversation, at races and in online running forums. It scared her at first. ‘Lol,’ a commenter wrote of Amaris on one message board. ‘She’s tiny once she hits puberty her times will be like unbelievably slower. Seen it happen many times.’”

3. More Consensus on Coffee’s Benefits Than You Might Think — New York Times

Although there are contradictory news reports all over the Internet about the health implications of drinking coffee, this treasure trove of research shows that the good far outweighs the bad.

Quote: “I’m also not suggesting that people start drinking coffee by the gallon. Too much of anything can be bad. Finally, while the coffee may be healthy, that’s not necessarily true of the added sugar and fat that many people put into coffee-based beverages. But it’s way past time that we stopped viewing coffee as something we all need to cut back on.”

4. The Trouble With Chicken — Frontline

This eye-opening exposé on Foster Farms, the source of a 2014 chicken-related salmonella outbreak that sickened 634 people, caused us to reevaluate our poultry consumption.

Quote: “The strains of salmonella are tougher, stronger and many of them are antibiotic-resistant.”

5. Navigating a Mother’s Mental Illness Through Photography — Time

Melissa Spitz chronicles her mother’s struggles with mental illness — from personality disorders to alcoholism — through photographs, a project that has brought the two closer together.

Quote: “Once, Spitz took her mother back to the high school where Deborah had been a popular cheerleader, and sat her down on the bleacher for a portrait. ‘She just started screaming and crying,’ Spitz recalls, ‘It was really fake at first but she kept doing that, and all of a sudden [she] had this tone that was just so real and full of pain.'”

6. ‘Mad Men’ Reveals The Surprising Difficulties Of Being A Woman With Cancer In 1970 — The Huffington Post

It turns out the portrayal of Betty Draper’s cancer diagnosis during the penultimate episode of “Mad Men” is pretty realistic.

Quote: “‘I graduated from medical school in 1985, and I can remember taking care of patients in the ‘80s and ‘90s, from families who were generally not very sophisticated, where people were outraged that the patient had been told that they had cancer,’ Brawley said.”

7. Urgent Care: Protecting Nurses Again Workplace Violence — Pacific Standard

When hospitals make budget cuts and reduce staff, it can put registered nurses, particularly those working the night shift, in one-on-one situations with violent patients.

Quote: “The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that violence against hospital workers is nearly five times greater than that against average workers in all other employment categories combined — and it seems to be rising.”

8. Radiolab Live: Tell-Tale Hearts Featuring Oliver Sacks — Radiolab

We shed tears over this final Radiolab interview with Dr. Oliver Sacks, the British neurologist who penned a poignant New York Times Op-Ed in February about his terminal cancer diagnosis.

Quote: “So far, the metastases from my eye are only in my liver. I’m told they love liver. Actually, I love liver as well. And one of the magical things I did was to go and have liver and onions soon after the diagnosis.”

9. Perfect Nails, Poisoned Workers — New York Times

Manicurists in New York City (and around the country) may be at risk for medical issues including respiratory illness, miscarriage, birth defects and cancer.

Quote: “Stories of illness and tragedy abound at nail salons across the country, of children born slow or ‘special,’ of miscarriages and cancers, of coughs that will not go away and painful skin afflictions. The stories have become so common that older manicurists warn women of child-bearing age away from the business, with its potent brew of polishes, solvents, hardeners and glues that nail workers handle daily.”

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

As senior vice president of customer experience, Catherine Courage is responsible for championing exceptional design to drive innovation at Citrix. Her team is responsible for company-wide brand, advertising, social, web, product design, information experience, and business process reinvention. Their mission is to partner with functions across the company to deliver an outstanding experience for both customers and employees

Courage began her career at Citrix in 2009 as vice president of product design. Her determination and passion to grow design as a core differentiator led to the competency becoming a company-wide initiative and to the elevation of her role to senior vice president of customer experience.

When Courage isn’t evangelizing design at Citrix, you’ll find her discussing the topic at TEDx, Stanford’s d.school, the California College of the Arts, Tech Women and Design Management Institute. She co-authored the book Understanding Your Users and her work has been featured by Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, and Fast Company.

Prior to Citrix, Courage held other design leadership positions at Salesforce.com and Oracle. She holds a master’s degree in applied sciences, specializing in human factors, from the University of Toronto. In addition, Courage is an active board member for the California College of the Arts and Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

How has your life experience made you the leader you are today?
I grew up on the east coast of Canada in the small town of St. John’s, Newfoundland. My first job was delivering daily newspapers. Each day after school whether there was rain, shine or a snowstorm, I had to physically carry 50 papers around the neighborhood. It taught me early on that disciple and hard work are required to be good at any job. I was grateful and proud to have that opportunity and I’ve learned to appreciate all the jobs that I’ve had throughout my career.

After graduating from the University of Toronto with a Masters in Applied Sciences, I became curious about technology and wanted to see what all the Silicon Valley ‘fuss’ was about. The thought of moving to California and working in tech was scary, but the opportunity was too exciting, so I used my excitement to overcome my fear. It’s been 15 years since I packed my bags and moved and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. If it didn’t work out, Toronto would still be there. I’ve never been afraid to take chances, even when they presented the unknown or scared me.

How has your previous employment experience aided your position at Citrix?
It was at Oracle that my passion for people-centric design became a career. I honed my user experience skills there for five years, focusing on becoming an expert in work practices, project leadership, and user experience and design. I co-authored a book, Understanding Your Users, with my coworker Kathy Baxter during this time, which taught me a tremendous amount about disciple.

Early in my career, I always raised my hand to lead a project or team, which helped further develop my leadership skills and gave me a taste of the management path I would later pursue–beginning with my subsequent move to Salesforce.com, where I saw the opportunity to build a new User Experience (UX) team from the ground up as a part of a small and rapidly growing product team.

At Citrix, I had the opportunity to take what I learned along my career and apply it to a large established company (20 years old with 7,500 people when I joined). As someone who was hired to introduce a new approach to design and customer experience, I quickly learned about the importance of change management. Six years later, I’ve been able to see the transformation of one of Silicon Valley’s most successful technology firms into a leader of design-driven excellence and innovation. It’s been an exciting and rewarding journey.

What have the highlights and challenges been during your tenure at Citrix?
When I first joined Citrix, CEO, Mark Templeton issued a challenge: Make Citrix a leader of design excellence by transforming the traditional engineering-driven company into one whose very DNA is built on the fundamentals of design thinking and doing. Design thinking was an ideal framework for us to use because it focuses on developing deep empathy for customers and creating solutions that will match their needs as opposed to just dreaming up and delivering technology for technology’s sake.

We started by training our product organizations and built a team of design professionals and researchers who could go out and understand what was on our consumers’ minds and the opportunities that we had in the areas where we compete. However, we soon found that a customer-centric approach was applicable to everything we were doing and we wanted to scale it across the business. As we started to do that, we realized that Citrix, like many companies, has different sub-cultures and the approaches that we tried in the product development area didn’t necessarily apply to other parts of the organization. This was an important lesson as we started working with different teams across the business.

To date we’ve trained almost half of our 9,000 employees in a customer-centric approach to problem solving using an approach that makes design thinking meaningful and relevant to everyone, regardless of division.

What advice can you offer women who want a career in your industry?
If I was to look back in time, I never would have believed that that I would become a Senior Vice President at a tech company, but that didn’t reflect a lack of confidence or ambition. First, I’ve always believed in the importance of owning your career. Often women work hard and wait for things to happen–you always have to be looking forward, seeking opportunity and challenge regardless of industry. Always make sure you’re learning from people in roles that you find interesting, and be proactive about finding out where you need to grow and improve. Join committees, lead projects and initiatives, and find ways to show that you’re ready to take the next step. As more people become familiar with your strengths and capabilities, you’ll have more supporters and advisors to help you advance.

Second, I believe fear comes into play in career advancement, too. I think this can be a challenge for women who may tend to let that feeling of fear hold them back. That twinge of doubt you feel is most often a sign that you’re pushing to the next level. My advice is to embrace it rather than letting it hold you back. I always tell myself that if for some reason this new role does not work out, I’ll brush myself off and find the next opportunity. It’s important to remember that the potential rewards of taking the chance you are considering are tremendous, and far more significant than the fears and risk you may be feeling.

How do you maintain a work/life balance?
Finding work/life balance is all about deciding what is important to you personally, and finding a way to make those things a priority in your own life. Work is very important and I spend a lot of time focused on it, but not at the cost of the things I love outside of work. I love the outdoors and physical activity. I strongly believe that making it a priority actually makes me better at my job. It allows me to clear my head and decompress. I often solve some of my toughest problems when I am out for a run or a swim. I think accountability is also key since I am very commitment oriented. By that I mean, if I plan to volunteer on a board, compete in a triathlon or have Thursday dinner with a friend…I’ll be there. If I don’t think I can follow through on a commitment I make, then I say no from the get go. Too often people take on more than they can handle because they want to please, and then it’s impossible to maintain any sort of balance. And worse, you can end up doing a number of the things, but doing them poorly because you can’t give the effort 100% of your focus. This is why I believe learning to say no and turn things down is an important skill.

What do you think is the biggest issue for women in the workplace?
To me, one big challenge is getting women into jobs in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). We can’t wait until college to engage them – that’s too late. We need to help young girls understand that careers in tech are incredible. Being in tech doesn’t mean you have to be an engineer writing code, though that is certainly a great career if it interests you! But, there are a whole host of related areas a girl can get interested in and pursue as a career field. In addition, jobs in tech provide great career paths, compensation, benefits and flexibility. I think the best way to combat this challenge is through exposure. We need to bring girls in to the workplace and run career workshops to get hands-on exposure to tech and other STEM fields. At Citrix, we’ve run sessions for young girls to demonstrate the role of art and creativity in our tech world. The most rewarding part is when a young girl visits our design studio and leaves saying “I want to work here.”

How has mentorship made a difference in your professional and personal life?
This question makes me reflect back on my first mentor. I had recently arrived in Silicon Valley fresh from grad school and my manager presented me with the opportunity to have a mentor. Believe it or not, I was actually a little insulted. I thought, “I know it all! What do I need a mentor for? I already have a manager – I don’t need a second one.” I quickly changed my tune after my first conversation with Joe, my newly introduced mentor. I soon realized that this relationship would be very different from a typical manager. My mentor was someone I could have very open and candid conversations with about my skills, ambitions, workplace politics, and whatever other career questions were on my mind. No matter what I said, I trusted Joe and knew I would not be judged. Our conversations were always held in the strictest confidence. My relationship with Joe, now going on over 15 years, has been one of the most valuable relationships in my life, both professionally and personally.

Living in Silicon Valley I often take for granted the accessibility of tech mentors like Joe who have many years of experience in the field. It’s nice to see that there are formal programs like EverWise available today to connect people to mentors, and I would suggest that anyone looking for a mentor try to develop this type of relationship.

Which other female leaders do you admire and why?
I was very lucky to be surrounded by a group of great female leaders from birth. My mother is one of four sisters. She completed her PhD while raising three children, and her three younger sisters each completed a doctorate degree. I grew up thinking I could do anything I wanted! I watched them work hard and earn their accomplishments, which made me believe I could and would achieve success like they had done. I could not have asked for better role models than these four women.

What do you want Citrix to accomplish in the next year?
Although I came into Citrix with a charter for product design leadership, the charter has grown considerably as people have realized just how important a company-wide customer experience focus is to our success. It’s been extremely gratifying to see design thinking come to life across our products and services, and to see how much adopting customer experience as a core tenant, not just a “nice to have,” has transformed the experiences we deliver to our customers.

Now that we have a strong customer experience team, and the whole company has embraced the idea of design thinking, the challenge is to maintain this momentum, and further strengthen our focus on customer experience as one of our most strategic differentiators. We believe customers will choose us and stay loyal to us because of this customer focus. We plan to build and scale what we have done to-date, making 2015 a year full of promise for Citrix.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Master navigator Nainoa Thompson was honored for Excellence in Exploration at the 2015 Peter Benchley Ocean Awards ceremony this week in Washington D.C. He is one of a handful of indigenous navigators that can find islands in the open ocean without instruments, using techniques handed down through generations for over a thousand years.

Thompson, mentored for decades by master navigator Mau Piailug, became the first Native Hawaiian in 700 years to practice long-distance wayfinding. As president of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, Thompson has overseen the 150,000 miles sailed over a span of 40 years by the traditional voyaging canoe, Hōkūleʻa.

Thompson and the captains and crew of the Mālama Honua Worldwide Voyage are nearly 10,000 nautical miles into their four-year voyage around the world to explore solutions and stories of hope for our oceans and environment. Here is what Thompson had to say yesterday about the award, the connection between finding islands and finding a sustainable future, and why he is feeling hopeful about our ability to mālama honua–care for Island Earth.

What does this award mean to you and the Mālama Honua Worldwide Voyage?

The award is not for me, because Hōkūleʻa is the one that has carried all of us. I just hold it and carry it for Hōkūleʻa and for Mau, the true explorers. If voyaging matters, you have to be able to acknowledge the thousands of people that sailed Hōkūleʻa, that cared for Hōkūleʻa, that made sure that she would be safe at sea, and the thousands of people that supported her. But at the core of that would be the great Mau Piailug that pulled Tahiti out of the sea and gave pride and dignity to the whole Pacific. He then came back for four decades and trained us. So, I don’t accept this award on behalf of myself. But it was an honor to be there.

Hōkūleʻa is not sailing in isolation. What Mālama Honua stories of hope did you hear at the awards?

I was among people that are great navigators in their own fields. You get a strong sense that there is hope among all the scientific evidence that is not hopeful. Together, they provide starlight that we can follow as we try to find our way. So, for me, being there tonight and connecting and building relationships with these extraordinary people, I think it strengthens the voyage and gives me a stronger sense of purpose. We were in a room full of navigators that against all the odds are doing everything they can to build a better world–the world our children deserve.

As a navigator, what changes have you seen in our oceans and environment over the past 40 years?
I see less fish, and more fishing boats. In the early years of voyaging, we would fish and by morning time we would pull in the lines because we had enough to eat. On our last trip to Palmayra we went 1,100 miles, and did not catch a single fish. I am not saying that it qualifies as scientific, but we are out there and we see a lot less life now in the oceans than we did before. It collaborates with the idea that 90% of the big fishes are gone. It is a scary time. Mounting evidence from the scientific world is painting a really bad ecological picture of the earth, and the issues of climate change and global warming, are issues of society–whether it is economic, social,or environmental. The things that we call “environmental issues” are the most important issues that humanity has to address across the earth.

Being with Pacific Islanders–those for thousands of years and hundreds of generations that have had their wellbeing dependent on the wellbeing of the oceans–people are worried. Things that have never been talked about before–new words like acidification, or dead zones or hypoxia–all these kinds of new words are in the conversation among Pacific people. And the irony is that Pacific people had no role in creating those words, and yet they will be the ones that arguably will suffer the most, first. And yet at the same time, you see there is this glimmer of hope because everybody in the Pacific is talking about it now, and people are coming together, from grassroots and government, and from different kinds of organizations. So I do believe that what I see is a human reaction to their world that’s in trouble, and they are coming together in a unifying way to make the world better. So it is a scary time, it is a challenging time, but also a pretty a hopeful time.

Given that the techniques you use for non-instrument navigation have been passed down through the generations over 1,000 years, how do these changes in the ocean and environment impact your ability to voyage traditionally? Can you maintain your tradition?

Things like the signs of the seabirds–we don’t see the seabirds like we used to. That makes it more difficult. The sealife that we use in navigation becomes much more comprised. We still can navigate, but I would say it is diminished. And then what do you navigate? What is the worth of navigation if all you are doing is accounting for a world that is diminishing? So, the issue of tying your tradition and tying the science and arts of navigation to the future comes to a position in which we have to be responsive. It is about responsibility to nature and the ocean and the earth, which is exactly where we need to be. I think the great navigators of today are the ones that recognize the changes in nature and are taking responsibility to do something about it.

Hurricane Pam, last year, was the first-ever Category 5 hurricane in the Asian Pacific in the month of May. Climate change is here. It is not an idea, it’s not a philosophy; it is here. With the hurricane season now, we are seeing way more intense storms, more days of very dangerous winds. And then we are seeing that the seasons are stretched. That is the one that becomes the biggest concern, because we try to keep hurricane risk to a zero tolerance by sailing in the non-hurricane season. We don’t actually know what that is anymore. Being a student of navigation, if our priority is keeping us safe we have to address it and do something about it.

There are people saying that going around the world on Hōkūleʻa is too dangerous; there is too much risk. The great risk of our time is not sailing Hōkūleʻa. The great risk of our time is ignorance, apathy, and inaction. The signs of nature are navigating us towards a stronger commitment to responsibility. We don’t have all the answers; that’s why we sail.
At the award ceremony, we are meeting a lot of people that are fully 100% committed, compassionate, and caring. A room full of pioneers and navigators that are doing their piece of the puzzle to create positive change. We wouldn’t be in the room if it wasn’t for the Worldwide Voyage. So the voyage is taking us to places that we needed to be. It makes us not only more hopeful but it strengthens our sense of purpose and helps us understand that it is important for us to sail.

For more about the Mālama Honua stories of hope and Hōkūleʻa’s planned arrival in Sydney, Australia this week, please visit http://www.hokulea.com. You can also view the Worldwide Voyage 3-minute video here.. All photos and video courtesy ʻŌiwi TV © 2014 Polynesian Voyaging Society and ʻŌiwi TV.

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